Windows 10 Is Making Too Many PCs Obsolete. REALLY???

[Smoke4320]

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I have a feeling most problems are due to the carbon keyboard interface.

very good

and also known as ugly bags of mostly water

[Soundguy]

IMHO.. XP was their best OS.. and it lasted a LOOOONG time.. and had EASY hardware requirements.

BUT.. you can't keep making money if you sell OS's that 15 year old computers can still run... you have to CREATE turnover..

[mold maker]

It's the optimum example of planned obsolescence......

[Bookworm]

First thing you would need is the Linux Mint OS on a bootable USB drive (IF your laptop supports booting from USB!). A couple of ways to do it. The easiest way is to go downlod an app called Etcher https://etcher.io/ which is so simple to make a bootable USB stick with it's sick how easy it is. You can download the portable version of Etcher, run it, select the Linux Mint .iso file, select the USB stick, and click FLASH and it does the rest.

Anyway, you would download the Linux Mint iso, burn it to USB as I described, boot off the USB and you can run Linux in a live version without writing anything to your hard drive or changing anything at all, it will run a full blown Linux Mint operating system from ram.

Suppose I wanted to do this - download and run Mint off a thumb drive. How big a thumb drive would be needed ?

2 gig ? 32 gig ?

[BrassMagnet]

Suppose I wanted to do this - download and run Mint off a thumb drive. How big a thumb drive would be needed ?

2 gig ? 32 gig ?

I'm in! Me too!

[Tom W.]

As computer dumb as I am I'm worried that I'd screw something up. If I can try it on my wife's older laptop first, I'd feel better. It's about 5 years old and is a 17" HP that had windows 10 installed and then put away into a closet somewhere.....

[Traffer]

I am a semi-retired Certified PC Technician. I skimmed through all the posts in this thread. No one mentioned the worst part of Windows 10. It is the ultimate spyware. Real spy-ware. When you use Windows 10 with the automatic settings on, not only is every keystroke you make recorded, BUT, they can run it through their many data analytic algorithms. When Windows 10 politely asks you if you want them to help you with their various assistance tricks, what they are really doing is gaining more, deeper and complex information on you. I believe that all this information goes directly to the NSA. It is stored and ready to give them more information about you than you can imagine. They could TELL YOU when you go to the bathroom if you use the computer a lot. They can easily build a psychological profile on you. In my opinion, THIS DATA MINING IS WHAT WINDOWS 10 WAS DESIGNED TO DO. I still use Windows 7. It is bad enough. There are many programs and tutorials out there to help you keep the unwanted Windows 10 off of your computer although I do not think they are trying to ram it down your throat anymore. You could also erase the operating system on a new Windows 10 computer and load Windows 7. I have the software to load every Microsoft operating system back to DOS. I tried to load Windows 95 on a computer a couple of years ago. It was so fast it seemed like everything was instant. However is cannot be set up to run on a modern machine. Nor can Windows 98 or 2000. Most machines will run Windows XP but it is quite a task to get them set up on a newer machine. I believe that Windows 7 is the best operating system Microsoft has come up with. I have tried Linux a few times. I am just too set in my ways to switch to it. But if I was younger I would definitely be using some flavor of it. This is an article that shows some of the ways in which Windows 10 can use your info. However it is written in favor of Microsoft and tries to manipulate the facts to make it look like they are benevolent. Microsoft, Google, Facebook and the like are not benevolent organizations. They are predatory.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/mili...orks-15910146/

[OptimusPanda]

Just download the linuxmint iso and burn the image to a DVD. You can use it live if you want. I prefer the cinnamon desktop myself, it's quite familiar for those fresh off Windows. Everything pretty much works for simple tasks. Games are another matter (some run well with wine others not).

[Bookworm]

Just download the linuxmint iso and burn the image to a DVD. You can use it live if you want.

Okay. This may make sense to some, but not me.

I understand "download the linux mint...", but "iso" ? Do you mean "OS", or "operating system" ?

Burn the image to a DVD ? I understand how to burn a DVD, what do you mean by image ?

Run it live ? Huh ?

[RGrosz]

I've worked with Windoze for years. Used to be a phone tech for a cow-spotted compute company till they let me go. Been working with Linux for almost as long. Running an old flavor on a 486 computer at home off a DVD for years to play games on. Would go with Linux all the way except some of the genealogy programs have no GPL equivalent and I'd lose all my data. There are pry some other stuff too. Pry do it one of these years anyway.
Rob

[kayala]

Okay. This may make sense to some, but not me.

I understand "download the linux mint...", but "iso" ? Do you mean "OS", or "operating system" ?

Burn the image to a DVD ? I understand how to burn a DVD, what do you mean by image ?

Run it live ? Huh ?

ISO in context of download is short for ISO 9660 image a bit by bit copy of an optical disk. DVD writing tools usually have an option to "write an image", so after you download ISO and burn it to a DVD - you would have a complete OS on that DVD and you can boot your computer from it.

[TexasGrunt]

IMHO.. XP was their best OS.. and it lasted a LOOOONG time.. and had EASY hardware requirements.

BUT.. you can't keep making money if you sell OS's that 15 year old computers can still run... you have to CREATE turnover..

You also can't support new hardware with a 15 year old OS. There's limitations as to what can be done.

Best OS I ever used was AmigaOS 3.5.

[Bookworm]

ISO in context of download is short for ISO 9660 image a bit by bit copy of an optical disk. DVD writing tools usually have an option to "write an image", so after you download ISO and burn it to a DVD - you would have a complete OS on that DVD and you can boot your computer from it.

Ahhh....the light comes on ! Thank you.

[TexasGrunt]

my hp workstation ran for 15 years before I needed to replace it. I suffered a virus and removal required reinstalling the system.. Sadly I only had the oririginal software, and the only way to get the final version that worked for so long would have required criminal action.

Bought a pc with windows 7. runs like a champ.

10 is supposed to be going to a monthly subscription service soon. you buy a pc, spend 200 for the privilege of having windows, plus a monthly fee to use it.

Ya gotta tell the WHOLE story.

On Tuesday, Microsoft confirmed that it would—though just for enterprises at the moment. Beginning this fall, Microsoft will offer Windows 10 Enterprise E3, a special enterprise tier of Windows 10 that will cost $7 per user per month.

At this time home users won't be paying monthly.

[Soundguy]

You also can't support new hardware with a 15 year old OS. There's limitations as to what can be done.

Best OS I ever used was AmigaOS 3.5.

Depends on the hardware. If there is a driver available.....

[Der Gebirgsjager]

I use 8.1. My computer started with periodic offers to install 10, then began scheduling times to install 10, and once was in the process of doing so when I caught it and stopped it. Then I installed "Never 10" which I read about right here on this forum---no more trouble at all for well over a year. Don't know what I'll do if and when this computer wears out......

[dragon813gt]

At this time home users won't be paying monthly.

"At this time" being the key words. Don't think for a minute that they won't it. If they switched to a monthly subscription you will see a huge number of people switching to Linux or Apple. More so than are currently already doing so.

[FredBuddy]

Early this spring, I saw one of DougGuy's posts about replacing windows and since my pc was acting strange I decided this was the time for a new one.

I took his description of the setup to a mom & pop shop in Loudenville, Ohio and sat down with Art, the owner and asked if he would build one for me.

He hesitated because he had no experience with Linux, but agreed to do it and also put win 7 pro on too. I had been adamant that win 10 was not an option. He was quite pleased with the end result.

When I reported back to him that I easily adapted to Linux mint cinnamon and it had everything windows had, he started to think about rehabing some older machines he had laying around.

Like many members here, I'm an old retired guy with some pc skills, but not enough to tackle the whole job. In the end it cost me under $500 for a new machine with the aformentioned stuff loaded and I am one happy camper.

DougGuy's advice is right on target,

[DougGuy]

I will tell you a good story or two... All the jokes about "All the wife sees is the back of his head" cause hubs is on the computer all the time.. In the 90s I played in bar bands and hung out with some biker bros, but we as a band stayed away from mingling with them beyond drinking and playing some of their functions. Meanwhile feds busted them on some bigtime stuff, wife at the time says "I was NEVER SO GLAD to see you at that computer!" If I hadn't had the PCs to keep me interested, I could have easily been wrapped up in the sting. +1 for the computers feeding the tinkerer's brain..

I tried every OS that was out at the time, having a multi boot machine with 6 OSes loaded on it that I could boot into at my fingertips. It was fun, it was a learning curve, and it both pushed me to excel at it and kicked my a$$ at the same time. Eventually I taught myself to tweak and strip down and streamline M$ products so they would run fast and be stable. I made a LOT of good money doing these custom configurations, going as far as cloning an image of the boot drive and hiding it on a hidden partition or a separate drive, then when Windows messed up, like it was certain to do, I could unhide the image and overwrite their boot drive and rescue the system and have it back to the exact condition it was in when I made the image. This worked great and I still do it even with Linux, I keep a duplicate SSD drive with the version of Linux copied to it so I can recover in just a few minutes with no lost data not even a picture or text file.

So.. Currently older hardware is dirt cheap to be had, I saw some super fast quad core Intel processors on ebay for $50! A guy can go out and buy a used motherboard combo, with cpu, fan, ram, video card, etc, for dirt cheap and it runs FAST as it did new when each piece cost hundreds of dollars. This is a goldmine for someone wanting to try out Linux b/c Linux will run for YEARS on that same $69 motherboard/cpu/ram combo that isn't good enough to even run windows 10.

The other thing that makes it really cheap and easy to implement, is the cost of SSD Solid State Drives, I can get a 128gb Sandisk at Walmart for $49 bucks, take it home, download a Linux .iso file, burn that file onto a USB stick with a free program called Etcher, boot off the USB and run a full blown version of Linux just from the USB loading it into ram, -OR- I can click an icon on the desktop that will begin the steps to install Linux to the $49 SSD I brought home from Walmart. It's that easy.

Now when I get bored, I go to a site called Distrowatch and I look and see what the latest Linux release is, and if it sounds interesting I will download it and burn it on USB, then load it onto one of the 5 or 6 SSD drives I keep laying around, just to see it run and see if I like it. I have a second computer that I use for this, and they call this process "Distro Hopping" where you go from one distro (distribution) of linux to another and another. So this second computer I call it my "hop box" and I run copies of Linux Mint, Fedora, openSUSE, Arch linux, Ubuntu, and I learn the various flavors of linux in this way.

They are mostly the same at the core, and each "family" will use the same software packages, same core commands, so if you have 20 different linux versions that all are "forked" off of Debian, then you know your way around the system already if you learn basic Debian commands and such, the differences become minimal. Same with Fedora, it comes from RedHat, so all the commands and software packages for redhat work for Fedora.

Linux Mint is the leader of the pack when it comes to making Linux user friendly and EASY for windows users to migrate over. We bought my 85yr old Mother a new Dell at Best Buy, took it home and wiped Win10 off, installed Linux Mint, she loves it. She hated windows 10 because of all the updates and bloatware installed that she didn't use and couldn't turn off or uninstall.

I guess you could install Linux Mint to a USB thumb drive however on older hardware it may run excessively slow, or you could buy an SSD drive and disconnect the windows drive, load linux onto the SSD and give it a try. You can dual boot, that is install linux "beside" windows on the same drive but unless you are fairly computer literate, it would help for you to either have someone help you to do this, or use a separate drive to install linux onto so you can keep it searate from windows.

Did I forget to mention that Linux (all flavors) is FREE? Thousands of software packages and applications, FREE. Libre Office, a full fledged office suite that does everything M$ office products do, FREE. Libre Office will run on windows too! Err, until windows 10's latest "Creator's Edition" invalidates it and says you can't run it.

[dragon813gt]

Libre Office will run on windows too! Err, until windows 10's latest "Creator's Edition" invalidates it and says you can't run it.

They really did this? They are slowly dying by thousands of self inflicted cuts. I realize they're a company that needs to make money to stay open. But invalidating competitors software is a poor move. I'm sure the EU will bring another antitrust lawsuit against them for a move like this.